MonkeyPants

Snow Day.

Yes. It snowed in Vancouver. What this means is the city is completely incapacitated, like a small child confronted by a bully. A big, wet, cold bully. Today, I got bullied by the snow.

I had to go out to tutor at 59th and Oak. Between buses not coming and the slippery slush that makes everyone with bad traction shoes (like me) walk this slow, mincing grandma walk, it took me an hour and a half to get there. SO not impressed at the waiting thirty minutes and then having three Oak buses come one after the other. I couldn’t feel my hands when I got on the bus.

So I tutored my students, hoping I wasn’t dripping too much melted snow onto their Brazilian cherrywood floors, and went back out inot the bluster. The bus was a mere fifteen minutes late. Hell, I could still feel my hands. No problem.

I got off at Broadway and Oak, and immediately slipped and sat down hard on the slushy sidewalk. Yep. Wet bum for the rest of the trip. Wet bum+strong cold breeze=extreme lack of comfort.

Luckily, my bum dried in Safeway somewhat, and then I had a nice 20-minute wait for another bus. At least my chicken stayed cold. So I got home and changed my pants, and went out to shovel our walk.

Someone has stolen our snow shovel! Marilyn hasn’t seen it. Ted upstairs hasn’t seen it. We don’t remember seeing it for a long time, because in Vancouver, you don’t think about snow shovels. You think about umbrellas and whether the leaky roof is going to hold. So I shoveled the walk with Marilyn’s little camping shovel, which held about a liter’s worth of snow per shovelful. Luckily, the shovel’s only three feet long, so all the bending over and straightening up I had to do meant I stayed warm.

And won’t it be fun tonight when all the slush freezes? I, for one, cannot wait.